Quotes About Meaning

For me, poetry is a way of thinking, and like many poets, I'm driven by the idea of trying to find the impossible, perfect words: the words that will hold my subject.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

The meaning of poetry has no sureness of direction; is like the sling, it is not under control.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are.

No amount of virtuosic skill and choice of subject matter can be a substitute for depth and poetry.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.

Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .